Posts Tagged ‘ferns’

Do a search for Māori weaving and you’ll turn up plenty. What you see in today’s picture, though, is nature’s own weaving in New Zealand in the form of some dry fronds hanging from a tree fern that caught my attention at the Waimangu Volcanic Rift Valley on March 5th.

Like this:

February 20 is still the height of summer in New Zealand. Nevertheless, on that date we hiked the hour or so from the carpark to the front of the Franz Josef Glacier, which is located in the Southern Alps half-way down the western side of the South Island. Before we’d gone too far along the trail I stopped to photograph the still-distant glacier. Europe and North America have their glaciers, but none that I know of are within sight of tree ferns. They were an excellent accompaniment to the first glacier I’d ever seen in person.

Oh, look at the lush green of the forest—the ferns, the mosses, the trees—at Muir Woods National Monument as I experienced it on October 29th. This place is just 12 miles north of San Francisco in a metropolitan area of millions and is therefore one of the most popular nature sites in the country. Unfortunately we ended up having to visit on a Saturday, when the multiple parking lots had filled up early and parked cars lined the country road for half a mile. None of that need trouble you in this tranquil picture.

Here’s an intimate landscape* from my visit to Great Hills Park on November 4th. The recent rains had made the maidenhair ferns (Adiantum capillus-veneris) turn a vivid green at the base of a boulder along the main trail in that area.

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* Some nature photographers use the term intimate landscape for a scene that doesn’t include the sky or horizon but that provides a broader view than a closeup. You can read more about intimate landscapes in the fourth paragraph of an article about Eliot Porter’s work.

Because of the ample rain this spring, some of the maidenhair ferns in Great Hills Park have been thriving. It was April 13th when I saw this group of Adiantum capillus-veneris* on a steep embankment of the main creek that flows through the park.

The dark curve making its way across the lower part of the picture marks the water line, so the little patches of green below the line are reflections on the water’s surface of some of the fern leaves above.

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* The Latin species name capillus-veneris means ‘hair of Venus’ (think capillary).